Kabuki Plays on Stage: Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864 (Kabuki Plays on Stage, Volume 3) by James R. Brandon Hardcover
416 pages
The fourteen plays mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.